Monday, February 9, 2015

Bengali Scotch Eggs (Dimer Devil)

Bengali Scotch Eggs (Dimer Devil)

I have this particular fascination with family recipes especially one that has survived 2 generations. When my fellow blogger and friend Pritha told me that she has some family recipes for chops and cutlets handed down by her grandmother to her aunt and mother, I was immediately excited with the prospect of family recipes. I knew that I had to get my hands on these recipes. For me, a recipe is a treasure and a recipe which survives 2 generations or more automatically becomes a part of history and culture and slowly heritage.

Pritha is an extremely dedicated person who sticks to her culinary challenges which she takes up every other month. Not that she doesn't keep preparing lip smacking dishes all round the year but every other month she takes up a challenge of creating one recipe after a other for a particular time span on a theme she chooses.

I completely stuck to the recipe except for using coriander leaves aka cilantro rather than parsley leaves .

Here is a little tip for you guys. In the recent past a very experienced lady who is part of the facebook Food group Ranna Bati brought this to light that the term Garam Masala is a very generalized term which makes so sense when it comes to Indian cuisine due to its vast range of cuisines. For instance a Punjabi would use Bay leaves and Black cardamom in his garam masala while a Bengali usually sticks to cinnamon, green cardamom , cloves and for special occasions there is the additional mace and nutmeg and usually we Bengalis do not grind our Garam Masal for most dishes . Now in many of my previous recipes I myself have used the term 'garam masala' without specifying the spices used.

In this recipe's context since its Bengali when I was making the mince meat filling since I had halved Pritha's recipe I had used 2 green cardamom, 2 cloves , 1/4th inch cinnamon . I dry roasted it and then used a mortar and pestle to make a finely ground powder.

When you fill the cavity of the egg whites with the mince meat and then use a bit of mashed potato to coat the egg make sure the coating of potato is not too much because if you make a very large oval shaped Dimer Devil to be fried when you fry it , chances are that the coating of batter would break on both the sides.

I would suggest serving the dish with the classic 'Kasundi' (Bengali Mustard condiment) and in its absence any mustard condiment is the ideal choice for the condiment.